Nokia’s Lumia 900 is bigger than the original 800 – but that’s not necessarily
better says Matt Warman.

Nokia’s Lumia 800 mobile phone is a beautiful piece of industrial design, matched with the excellent new Windows Phone 7 software. There’s a certain injustice that it is not selling better – Microsoft’s global phone market share is now down to less than 2 per cent.

The new Lumia 900 is a bigger, very similar device, looking almost identical but adding a substantially larger, 4.3” screen and a front-facing camera.

That means, in a sense, that reading a review of the Lumia 800 and then asking yourself if you want a phone with a slightly bigger display should be enough. That added camera is useful but unlikely to be essential; the larger model incorporates a proportionally bigger battery, but the Lumia 800 battery was fine enough to last the whole day anyway, after software was updated by Nokia.

Indeed, the Lumia 900 is basically just a bigger version of its 3.7” sibling – but there are a couple of downsides. The curving corners of the glass on the 800’s excellent screen are replaced here by sharper angles – where the 800 looked like a single unit, now the 900 looks like a phone set in a plastic case. It’s a minor detail, but an important design point.

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Meanwhile, where other phones offer quad core processors for extra speed, the 900 sticks with a dual version. It seems, however, to cope perfectly well. Similarly, although you can’t upgrade the 16GB on storage on the device, it is complemented by 25GB of online storage, and the combination should be plenty for most users. The Carl Zeiss lens on the 8MP camera provides excellent pictures, especially outside.

Windows Phone continues to lack the apps to truly compete with Android or iOS, and they do not necessarily look better on a bigger screen, but there are also more than enough to satisfy most users. And almost all of them look lovely.

The Lumia 900 offers some straightforward improvements over the 800, too: the larger battery is better, and lasts for up to a day and a half in light use; the screen is beautiful, with really deep blacks; the charging port is no longer covered by an annoying plastic flap; the increased overall size is big but not too big, which is a common complaint about rival Android phones such as the HTC One X.

Nokia has also added internet tethering, so you can share your phone’s connection. This is a really useful feature, but its addition corrects a deficiency, bringing the device up to the standards of its rivals. For WP7, nonetheless, it is an improvement, and is being added to other devices via the ‘Tango’ update.

Like the design, the software feels solid in the hand. Nokia’s own list of apps is growing all the time, with excellent Drive, Music and public transport programmes, complementing the Windows Phone 7.5 operating system. There’s now even a Sesame Street app.

But it’s worth remembering that the 900 was invented for American 4G networks; it’s bigger so it can cope with the increased demands of high speed data. A lack of apps still hampers Windows Phone to some extent, but the Lumia 800 remains the best device for the OS on the market, but the 900 isn’t far behind.